It’s pretty embarrassing when you realize you have spent the last 25 minutes fighting a machine that refuses to give you a Super Nutty Crunch Bar. At this point you could have walked up a flight of stairs and had a more pleasant transaction with a kinder candy dispensing robot. But of course all the doors are locked and you cant leave this room if you really wanted to. It’s just you and the VEND-380. Forever in combat. There are no winners.

my most interesting experience with a vending machine was when i was a kid. it was an old 1970s style one in front of a small mom and pop gas station near my house. it was kind of like a roulette wheel. youd sometimes get nothing for your money.sometimes youd get one pop,sometimes two. one time i got 3 pops and 3 times my money back.

The Coke machine in the basement of the Naval Science building at UofU would sometimes jam; snaking an arm in, I could jiggle the bottles straight and get one to behave. But then I had an arm covered in finely ground glass (this was 1966-7-8, with real bottles.)

I don’t get what the big deal about sodas needing to be cool is. Unless I’m eating something spicy, room-temperature Dr Pepper tastes just fine to me. Especially when eating cold cereal, the contrast is refreshingly jarring.